What Are Blues Guitar Tabs?

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By: Mike Hammil

There is a common misconception among non-musicians that in order to play an instrument you need to be able to read music. This is not true especially with guitar players. For many guitar players you might as well ask them to read Chinese before they will be able to read music. Blues guitarists seem to be especially bad with this mostly because blues is all about feel and once a blues guitarist learns where they are on the fret board they will usually just feel their way through songs for their entire careers. For guitar players that cannot read music the idea of tablature, abbreviated as TAB, was created. If you look at a piece of music that has the word TAB in the area where the music staff should be you will notice that the music is replaced by a bunch of numbers and symbols. You will also notice that TAB staff is six lines instead of 5 like standard music. The six lines are guitar strings and the numbers are placed on the TAB staff to let you know in what fret you will place your finger on that string to make that note. The symbols indicate things like note bends and slides. Once you learn to read TAB it is quite easy. Many blues guitar players use blues guitar tabs to not only learn how to play songs but they also use blues guitar tabs to study the style of their favorite player. Nearly every great blues player got their style by imitating someone else and blues guitar tabs allow a player to slow down what is being played so that they can see exactly how their favorite player created a particular part. Using blues guitar tabs is helpful if you are in a band and need to learn a lot of songs fast or if you are learning a complicated blues song and you need blues guitar tabs to figure out how certain parts are played. Either way blues guitar tabs are a great help in learning to play certain songs and in learning to play the guitar in general. Make Your Own Tab Just like you can get blank music staff paper to write your own music on you can also get tab staff paper to write your tab on and it is great when you are studying blues guitar tabs to have some blank tab staff paper around to make your own notes. That is the great thing about blues guitar, you can do whatever you want to make it your own and study it however you want. With blues guitar there are no rules so find some blues guitar tabs that you like and start studying the way you want to. Sometimes you just cannot figure out how your favorite player is playing a certain part in one of your favorite blues songs and you want to use blues guitar tabs to figure it out. They are readily available in books all over the place or you can buy downloadable tabs for your personal use at home.